Dr. Joy Kong explains that stem cells can renew themselves and transform into different cell types. Mesenchymal stem cells live near blood vessels, sense injury, and migrate to damaged tissue, which is why they're used in treatments. Ask your doctor which cells were used in yours.
So what is a stem cell? I get that question asked a lot. Let me break it down for you. I'm Dr. Joy Kong, a triple board certified doctor and a stem cell specialist. There are two things that stem cells do. One, they can renew themselves. Two is that they can differentiate, which means gaining function and making more specialized cells. When we were born, we were once a single stem cell. And from there on, the cells keep dividing and migrating and start to form more complex structures. Each step along the way, they gain function and lose potential. And when they finally become a working cell of no longer stem cells. But what cells do we actually use in stem cell therapy? Nowadays, the most common cells we use is what's called mesenchymal STEM cells, or MSCs for short. So MSCs are everywhere along your blood vessels, and their function is to sense what's going through your blood and what's going on in the neighborhood. They can squeeze themselves into blood vessels to find signals of inflammation and injury, and then get out of the blood vessel to rescue the local tissue. So your immune system can send troops to come over and rescue and do the repair work. So MSCs age and stem cell therapy can replenish the population, thus giving the body more signals to regenerate. Have you received stem cell therapy? Do you know what kind of cells you got? If you don't, we should talk.
